“How long have you known this?” Vivian asked impatiently.
Marlon shrugged. “Twenty minutes, maybe.”
“Nearly coincident with the murder.”
“Well, yes. I’d guess the two subjects are related.”
Vivian sighed, and started twisting at the hem of her skirt again. “Were you going to tell me about this? Were you waiting for me to figure it out on my own?”
“Er, you’ve only been here a minute.”
“Indeed,” Tamra said, in mildly commanding tones. “Let’s not expect too much of the victims, dear. They’re distraught.”
Vivian bowed her head momentarily. “Of course, yes. Excuse my error.” When she raised it again, her eyes were clear. “Are there other copies of you two around the Queendom?”
“Yes,” Marlon and Deliah answered together. “Several.”
“At all the grapple stations in the Capricorn arc,” Marlon added. “We’re attempting to tune them for operation at higher frequencies. I believe I’m on Mars right now as well, though I wouldn’t swear to it.”
Nodding distractedly, Vivian took a little wellstone slate out of a pocket in her skirt, touched a lighted circle, and said into it, “Lieutenant Shiao, would you please have your people check all the grapple stations in the Capricorn arc? Let me know if you find anything unusual.”
“Yes’m,” the slate said without delay. “Right away.”
She touched the little circle again and put the slate away. “Where on Mars?”
“I couldn’t say, exactly.”
“Can you call yourself there?”
Marlon shrugged. “Not easily. I can send a message, and reply when I get it.”
Vivian nodded. “Good. Do that. Now I’m afraid we’re going to have to view the bodies. This may be unpleasant for you. If either one of you want to change your minds, now would be the time.”
“I’m all right,” Marlon said, shaking his head grimly.
“I’m saturated and therefore imperturbable,” Deliah answered, less confidently.
“Well then, let’s proceed.”
The instrument room was only a little farther on, surrounded by a knot of white-suited technicians. Cheng Shiao was here as well, presiding over the evidence collection, gazing into a slate of his own and nodding at something someone was saying. At the sight of Vivian, he jerked to attention.
“Commandant-Inspector! A pleasure. You’re looking well.”
“I’ve aged a month,” she replied, a little snottily.
Marlon and Deliah crowded slowly forward, their curiosity battling a sense of reluctance and, to all appearances, defeating it. Police technicians parted solemnly for them.
“Oh,” Marlon said, in flat tones.
Deliah was less sanguine. “How completely rude! Look at this! Do I deserve this? Gods, the inconsideration. This must have hurt!”
By craning his neck, Bruno was able to see around her, to see what she was looking at: herself and Marlon lying in heaps on the floor of the instrument room, with their toes pointing down and their faces pointing up. Someone had twisted their heads completely around, leaving wide, ugly, red-black bruises all around their necks, almost like burns. In the doorway, a lacquer-black robot sprawled, powerless and inert. It was small, probably not more than a meter and a half in height, though its arms and hands and especially its fingers were of disproportionate length. Its glossy exterior betrayed no dents or scratches or other signs of violence; it seemed to have just dropped there, perhaps while exiting the room.
“That doesn’t belong here,” Tamra said unnecessarily. “That’s not government issue.”
Vivian examined the scene for several seconds, pursing her lips and nodding. “Homicide, two counts, officers on the scene. Murder weapon is possibly a robot. Lieutenant, do we have a reconstruction yet?”
Bruno was surprised to see a heaviness around the edges of her eyes, as if she were suddenly holding back tears. Her lip quivered a little, although her voice had been firm and clear. Perhaps dealing with this sort of carnage wasn’t as easy for her as Tamra might like to believe.
“Yes’m,” Cheng Shiao said at once. He held up a wellstone slate. Vivian clicked her own, smaller one against it, and the two units chimed. An image appeared of the murder scene, exactly as it lay before them all but without the crowd, without the police and technicians and royal entourage complete with silver bodyguards. There was only Marlon, and Deliah, and the enigmatic little robot.
“The time is twenty-eight minutes ago,” Shiao said. “Both victims are clinically dead, in the presence of an inactivated autronic device of roughly anthropoid design, as seen here.” On the displays, in three-dimensional miniature, the faces and bodies of the two prone figures began to twitch. The movements were slight, but the time scale was clearly compressed, so that the corpses seemed to take on a kind of manic quiver reminiscent of an AC electrical shock.
“Death throes, approximately four minutes for the woman and three for the man, may be considered mercifully brief. Neural and circulatory connections between brain and body have been completely severed, and both brains have suffered additional, acceleration-related traumas, owing to the great violence of the event. Organized memories not related to smell or emotion should be considered irretrievable in both cases. Whether this damage was deliberate or incidental is a matter for speculation.
“Continuing backward in time, we find the autronic device, colloquially a ‘robot,’ showing its final signs of activity. Central processing shuts down last, following the termination of emergency and backup power. Here the memory is wiped and erased, and shortly before that, primary power shuts off, most likely under CPU command.”
On screen, the robot twitched, then rose to its feet like a marionette. It stood still for a moment, then turned around suddenly and brought its hands out parallel in front of it, raised slightly above the level of its head. The body of Marlon Sykes, twitching more violently now, rose from the floor and placed its head between the robot’s hands. Its neck was still twisted, though there was now no sign of the burnlike discoloration. If it could be said that there was any facial expression at all, it was one of simple discomfort, of skin and muscle hanging crooked and rudely pressed, like the face of a sleeper propped awkwardly in a chair not meant for sleeping.
That was only for a moment, though. In the next instant, the body’s head was rotated sharply, with such speed that Bruno didn’t see it happen, and afterward Marlon stood there, looking over his shoulder with what was now very clearly an expression of fear and startlement.
Then, in quick succession, the body of Deliah van Skeltering first hurled itself upward into the robot’s waiting hands, then twisted its head around similarly, then turned, intact, to face the information-rich wall of the instrument room. Bruno noted that the walls were not randomizing, as they had been when he himself had last seen them.
“The second and first murders occur, to all appearances, a premeditated and in fact calculated attack. Here the robot enters and approaches.”
The black machine leaped backward out of the room, landing lightly on its feet, and then commenced a stately—if accelerated—backward stroll along the grapple station’s main avenue. The viewpoint followed it all the way back to the fax gate, where it vanished.
“Curiously,” Shiao said, “the fax has no record of this transaction. We deduce it purely from the age and placement of molecular traces left by the robot’s feet. From this point, the scene remains largely unchanged for sixteen minutes, forty seconds, at which point there is a record of passage for two persons—Her Majesty Queen Tamra Lutui and Declarant-Philander Bruno de Towaji—and their accompanying guards.”